indestructible precedent was set up; it was the great corner-stone in
the support of the modern Church edifice; on this definitive
foundation all other stones were to be superposed, one by one. In
1801, Pius VII., under the pressure of the reigning Napoleon, had
obliged the prelates of the old régime, sullied by a monarchical
origin and suspected of zeal for the dethroned Bourbons, to abandon
their seats. In 1816, under the pressure of the re-established
Bourbons, the same Pius VII. obliged Fesch, cardinal-archbishop of
Lyons, and uncle of the fallen Napoleon, to abandon his seat.
Bercastel et Henrion, XIII, 192. Cardinal Fesch having been banished
from France by the law of January 12, 1816, "the Pope no longer
regarded the person of the cardinal, but the diocese that had to be
saved at any cost, by virtue of the principle salus populi suprema
lex. Consequently, he prohibited the cardinal from "exercising
episcopal jurisdiction in his metropolitan church, and constituted M.
de Bernis administrator of that church, spiritually as well as
temporally, notwithstanding all constitutions decreed even by the
general councils, the apostolic ordinances, privileges, etc." In both
cases the situation was similar, and, in the latter as in the former
case, motives of the same order warranted the same use of the same
power.

But the situation, in being prolonged, multiplied, for the Church, the
number of urgent cases, and, for the sovereign pontiff the number of
cases of intervention. Since 1789, the entire civil order of things,
constitutional, political, social and territorial, had become
singularly unstable, not only in France but in Europe, not only on the
old continent but likewise on the new one. Sovereign states by
hundreds sunk under the strokes and counter-strokes, indefinitely
propagated and enforced by the philosophy of the eighteenth century